Pimlico Suite Brings PIM Simplicity To The Desktop

By , Published December 28, 2009

Pimlico is a self-described suite of €œPersonal Information Management (PIM) Applications."

Although intended for use on handheld and mobile devices, the suite is built using the GTK toolkit and Evolution Database Server – making it fully compatible with Evolution and perfectly suitable for running on the GNOME Desktop.

It consists of four applications, all primarily developed by the OpenedHand project:

  • Contacts
  • Sync
  • Tasks
  • Dates

Contacts

Contacts_042
'Contact’s' is a simple address book for keeping your contacts data in.

It can seamlessly integrate with Evolution allowing any contact data that exists in your Evolution address-book to be accessed via Contacts.

Tasks

[tasks date[3].png]

A simple €œto-do€ task manager complete with notes feature and due dates.

We've covered Tasks in more detail during our review of Linux €œto-do€ applications. You cam

Dates

Wednesday, 09-12-09 - Dates_044

A simple Calendar application that makes planning fun. It features a unique €œzooming view€ feature and allows for easy manipulation of entries by resizing them.

Sync

Sync is currently ready for public consumption but aim to sync all of the data in your PIMLICO apps with other sources.

I would love to see it gain some Google App integration €“ but i think that's a bit too wishful!

Conclusion

The applications are designed to be small, lightweight and feature-focused. They don't come with bells-and-whistles (at least not yet!) so revel in doing what they're supposed to with relative ease.

Some may find them superfluous additions to the app roster when the majority of their features exists within the GNOME desktop as it (either via Evolution or Tomboy, etc) yet for users who don't use those applications Pimlico offers an elegant alternative for managing your personal information. 

Download

No official release has been made of any of the applications within the suite. Therefore you must bear in mind that these are development versions and not intended for use in €œproduction environments€ (I.e. don't rely on them to work 24/7).

if you're still curious you can get each of the applications source via the official site. For ease i've posted links below.

Sync, as of yet, is only available via the Pimlico SVN. You can get a copy of the source using

  • svn co http://svn.o-hand.com/repos/sync/trunk sync

Install

Once extracted, the applications can be installed using the usual three steps. Enter the directory and run: -

  • ./configure
  • make
  • sudo make install
Article originally appeared on omgubuntu.co.uk

Related posts:

  1. To-Do Applications Reviewed [Updated With Another App!]
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  • marie_jo

    note that it’s being used by the moblin project: http://moblin.org/

    • http://omgubuntu.co.uk/ d0od

      Oh yes, i forgot to mention Intel bought the development company behind it. Makes sense it would appear in intel’s moblin.

  • mike

    With just some little tweaks they would be really usable in the desktop environment.

    Sadly their development stalled, the Dates app really needs some widget love for the calendar. Besides that, I have open Contacts and Tasks besides Evolution all the time.

  • Anonymous

    Nice! Sorry, I don’t usually point out spelling errors, but it’s “Pimlico”… there’s a famous racetrack in the U.S. by the same name. In the headline, the l and i are transposed.

    And the spelling police have left the building! Good article! This sort of thing doesn’t get a lot of coverage anywhere else.

    • http://omgubuntu.co.uk/ d0od

      Oh thanks for pointing that out. I was incredibly conscious about trying to spell it correctly, as well!

  • MB

    Thanks for this one, d00d! 2 questions:

    1) Wouldn’t you have Google App integration for Pimlico if Evolution was connected to Google? On my machine, I couldn’t get Evolution Calendar and Tasks to cooperate reliably with Google – but you get this proxy idea!

    2) Do you happen to know any Linux stand-alone app that integrates with Google Calendar *and* can send notification alerts / popup-windows? I hate to keep Thunderbird/Lightning or Evolution open all of the time. If your schedule is displayed by GNOME panel’s time/calendar applet or some kind of widget/screenlet, you still have to check manually on a regular basis for upcoming events. So alerts which do not self-disappear would be great!

  • MB

    I “apt-cache search”-ed a bit and stumpled upon gcalcli. Then I thought about a cron-job which could do the trick:

    “gcalcli -user X -pw Y remind 5 ‘zenity -text $ALERT’”

    On a second thought, I realized that this would require a permanent online connection. So what’s needed, is an alert-daemon connected to a local calendar cache. Any ideas?

  • MB

    I “apt-cache search”-ed a bit and stumpled upon gcalcli. Then I thought about a cron-job which could do the trick:

    “gcalcli -user X -pw Y remind 5 ‘zenity -text $ALERT’”

    On a second thought, I realized that this would require a permanent online connection. So what’s needed, is an alert-daemon connected to a local calendar cache. Any ideas?

    • MB

      Just for the record: googsystray, which has been recently covered on this blog, does the job of desktop-alerts for google calendar events. according to the developer, popup-windows will see the light of day soon (as of now, only sound-alerts and tray-nofications are supported):

      “1.2 — By popular demand, the 1.2 minor release series will be about popup notifications, via pynotify on Linux (which works with notifyOSD as well as older notification systems), Snarl and Growl support for Windows, and a native system for those who don’t want to install a notification daemon.”